Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Bleeding Hearts


First the NBC health reporter, Dr. Nancy Snyderman, and her crew whose cameraman had come down with Ebola in West Africa broke quarantine to travel to a fast-food restaurant in New Jersey. Then a nurse who treated the Ebola patient Thomas Duncan in Dallas traveled to Cleveland and back by plane even after she detected a low-grade fever which later turned into Ebola. Then a medical clinician who had handled bodily fluids from Ebola patient Duncan in Dallas took an ocean-liner cruise to the Caribbean that cost thousands of passengers their vacations when it was forced to return to port.

Next the doctor who came back from West Africa with a case of Ebola initially lied to police about his activities in New York City … see: New York Post Story. Now the nurse who also returned from West Africa after volunteering to treat Ebola patients there is refusing to observe her quarantine in Maine … see: CBS Story.

What is it about these people … professionals all? Can they not give up twenty-one days of their lives so that their fellow citizens can remain a wee bit safer from this dreaded disease? Have we become such a selfish, me-centered country that so many professionals irresponsibly ignore what appears to be rational public-health policy? Are their neighbors just as worthy of their empathy as those who are already sick? And how can our president encourage such bad behavior on the part of our citizens’ (but not our soldiers’) parts? His logic and that of the CDC and NIH appears to this observer to be so convoluted as to be silly … see: Logic is Logic.

Do liberals somehow lose all their gray matter when their hearts start bleeding?

Afterward: Just heard the president talk on the Ebola crisis ... and imply that anyone, who is in favor of a 21 day quarantine for workers who has been in close contact with Ebola patients, does not appreciate the sacrifice that they have made ... and will discourage others to do the same. Our president's brain must be miswired in that he cannot hold both thoughts at the same time. Clearly these volunteers are wonderfully fine people ... but they still should be quarantined for the safety of their friends and neighbors.

The president also mentioned that Nigeria and Senegal are now free of Ebola. What he neglected to note was that these two countries (and many other African nations too) have closed their borders to the three raging Ebola-infected West African nations.

By the bye, California has just instituted this same 21-day quarantine for returning health-care workers ... see: LA Times Article. (Look out Jerry Brown!)

2 comments:

DEN said...

The sky is not falling, mon ami, the professionals you cite know that the virus is not contagious via casual contact. That explains the fact that there have been no, zero secondary infections( beyond health care workers who handled fluids) from those who contracted the disease in West Africa and returned to USA.

George W. Potts said...

Yet most of these health-care workers (and that NBC cameraman) don't know exactly how they were infected ... even after taking extraordinary protective measures. Strange, no?